Electoral Voters Speak Out; Here’s What’s Going to Happen Monday

The Associated Press interviewed over 330 electors from both sides of the aisle and found out that come Monday, there’s not likely to be many standing in the way of President-elect Donald Trump’s victory being confirmed.

The AP reported:

Republican electors are being swamped with pleas to buck tradition and cast ballots for someone else at meetings across the country Monday that are on course to ratify Trump as the winner. AP interviews with more than 330 electors from both parties found little appetite for a revolt.

Whether they like Trump or not, and some plainly don’t, scores of the Republicans chosen to cast votes in the state-capital meetings told AP they feel bound by history, duty, party loyalty or the law to rubber-stamp their state’s results and make him president. Appeals numbering in the tens of thousands — drowning inboxes, ringing cellphones, stuffing home and office mailboxes with actual handwritten letters — have not swayed them.

It takes 270 electoral votes to make a president. Despite losing the national popular vote, Trump won enough states to total 306 electoral votes. He would need to see three dozen fall away for him to lose his majority. Only one Republican elector told AP he won’t vote for Trump.

Over the sweep of history, so-called faithless electors — those who vote for someone other than their state’s popular-vote winner — have been exceptionally rare.

Hector Maldonado, a Missouri National Guardsman and Republican elector, noted that he took a moment to console one correspondent who he said was afraid about a Trump presidency. Maldonado, a medical-equipment seller in Sullivan, Missouri and a Mexican-immigrant, supported Sen. Ted Cruz during the GOP primaries but noted that he will cast his vote for Trump on Dec. 19.

“I took an oath once to become a U.S. citizen,” Maldonado explained, “and on Aug. 14, 1995, that was the first oath that I’ve taken to support the U.S. Constitution. A year later I took the oath again, to support the duties of being an officer in the U.S. Army. This was the third oath that I’ve taken to execute what I promised to do.”

Tom Lawless, a Nashville attorney and supporter of Sen. Marco Rubio during the primaries, put it this way: “Hell will freeze and we will be skating on the lava before I change. He won the state and I’ve pledged and gave my word that that’s what I would do. And I won’t break it.”

As the AP noted, state laws vary but even in those states that don’t require electors to take an oath that they will vote how their state’s citizens did, or don’t put in place legal consequences, it is largely expected that they will respect the vote of the people.

Dec. 19 is just days away and hopefully that will be the end of at least this attempt to undermine Trump…